Black Friday Retail Continues to Lose Ground to Online Shopping

Peter Wynn Thompson/AP Images for Amazon26 Nov 2018

Foot traffic to physical stores fell between 5 and 9 percent on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday this year, while online stores prospered.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “traffic to U.S. stores fell between 5% and 9% compared with the same days last year,” citing “RetailNext, which uses cameras to track people in both mall-based and stand-alone retailers.”

Meanwhile, the Journal added, “Internet sales for Wednesday through Black Friday surged 26.4% from a year earlier to $12.3 billion.”

Internet traffic on Cyber Monday is also vastly outperforming physical stores, with Reuters reporting that Monday “is expected to be the largest U.S. online shopping day ever, generating $7.8 billion in sales.”

“Drawing an estimated 75 million shoppers, the event will severely test retailers’ online platforms as well as their delivery operations,” Reuters explained. “If not backed with the right IT infrastructure, the heavy traffic will lead to headaches such as outages and other technical glitches.”